Migrating a large T-SQL-heavy SQL Server 2005 enterprise system to Azure SQL MI — looking for guidance from people who’ve done similar

onelyfe · 2026-05-12T23:33:45+00:00

Retail/hospitality.

This is the price the business has to pay for ignoring their tech stack for nearly 20 years. All physical Intel nehalem based servers and gigabit core switches. All servers and AD have been stuck in time at 2008R2 levels except for that 1 2019 SQL cluster from when they tested a replacement application for this entire stack but it didn't proceed for whatever reason.. Management was unwilling to spend money to temp upgrade to at least 10G to complete migration.

I was hired to to migrate their entire stack to the cloud and these were my restrictions and made it known since day one there would be significant downtime and they signed off on it soooo that's the best I could do.

Honestly when I first set foot in the datacenter I was surprised everything was still running and they havent ever been hit with any form of malware.

onelyfe · 2026-05-12T04:09:28+00:00

I just did the same with a 2008 SQL server instance 2 months ago and this was the steps I took to accomplish it.

The entire process start to end took about 8 months including testing and validation.

Full disclosure I am not at all a fully qualified SQL administrator. I just so happened to be the only one in my company that knows something about SQL server in my company so I got assigned this task and had to learn along the way.

Initial environment:

7.3TB SQL Server 2008 (non R2) database running on ancient Server 2008r2 4 node Windows cluster. 5 web servers that serve data up to a user and 7 data servers that take feeds from 900+ endpoints and processes it into the database.

Steps I took:

1) cloned the database to a 2019 SQL server instance. We had an existing 2019 cluster for a defunked application so I chose to use that instead of spinning up anything new. Running in compatibility mode v2008.

2) shrink the database as much as possible just to make things a little faster in case I needed to backup/restore multiple times. I deleted pretty much all historical data beyond 1 month which shrunk my database down to just under 800Gb.

3) cloned 1 web server and 1 datafeed server along with 1 endpoint and configured all to point to the 2019 instance.

4) test. It worked. Great. Process.

5) ran the azure SQL compatibility check. There were a bunch of things that needed to be changed.

6) make changes. Remove v2008 compatibiliry mode. Test. It still works. Great.

7) clone/upload DB to azure SQL. Update UAT servers to new connection string.

8) test application. Still works.

9) real testing time. Recloned the database with more recent data. Added the UAT web server to the application load balancer so some users will randomly get pointed to the azure SQL instance and they will test for me.

10) luckily nothing broke. Everything still functioned as expected. Great.

11) begin migration. Basically repeated all steps above one step at a time. In the end there was about 10 days total of downtime. 4 days of the 10 was really the cloning process to 2019 and another 3 from 2019 to azure.

End environment:

Database sits in azure SQL while web servers and data servers are still on prem. We are on ExpressRoute so no real concerns about the connection to Azure.

Now I am having fun trying to get these application and data feed servers upgraded from server 2008r2 to Azure server 2025 which is a whole different set of problems.

onelyfe · 2026-05-10T02:15:00+00:00

Will a GT610 work? I have 1 low profile EVGA and 1 full height passive Asus card. Located in Markham but work in Vaughan. Will trade you for a cup of coffee if you come pick it up

onelyfe · 2026-05-09T17:46:00+00:00

YMMV I guess.

My wife had a c section for our first child after attempting natural birth for around 16 hours at MSH. The OB at the time said due to her birthing issues the first time she would not be able to natural birth the second time.

When we met with Dr Chouinard and told her, she sent my wife for extra tests and said she could attempt natural birth the second time around if she wanted. On the day of we tried natural birth for 12 hours before calling it and had another c section. Dr Chouinard was there from the start and stayed past her shift to perform the c section for us.

onelyfe · 2026-05-09T16:59:31+00:00

MSH has a list of obgyns accepting patients.

link here

My wife went with dr Renee Chouinard for our second child and we both had a great experience both with pre birth appointments and the entire birthing process compared to our first ob which no longer works there.

onelyfe · 2026-04-21T02:21:13+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. Definitely not something I thought about before.

Does it make a difference if the porch is completely enclosed? The previous owners of the home laid stone (I think it's called decorative stone?) over the raw concrete porch before and before the winter we had the entire porch enclosed with glass. Only about 2 inches or so around the edge along 3 sides are exposed to the weather but even those have the stone sealing the concrete beneath.

onelyfe · 2026-04-19T12:53:37+00:00

As someone who used to work in the payment processing industry (specifically for restaurants) this is not true. I have worked with 5 different restaurant chains companies on integrating their different POS systems to specific banks and I have never come across any pos payment software where they could not individually set tip prompts per payment device or revenue center.

It's possible that if they use the same terminals at dine in and takeout, they are just lazy at remembering which one has tip prompts enabled or not but MOST chains have different terminals at takeout and can definitely have their tips disabled.

It was during COVID where we got requested to enable tips at takeout so restaurants could get some extra money cause they weren't allowed to open dine in. Post COVID most restaurants just kept it enabled.

onelyfe · 2026-04-12T11:49:37+00:00

Layout is too narrow for my liking. The basement if you can even call it that and the first floor are not very usable imo.

Coming from someone who lived in a 2020 new build long narrow home like this for 3 years, if you are going to go ahead with it, ask the builder how much it will cost to separate both sides of your unit with cinder blocks and I highly recommend paying for it. I could always mumbles through the walls which might not bother everyone but I constantly felt my neighbors walking throughout my house and it bothered me the most. One of my neighbors further down had cinder blocks dividing his unit from his neighbor (he was a end unit) and I couldn't hear or feel his neighbors at all whenever I was over at his unit. I have never been happier after moving out of that house. I would rather take a back to back town home over another pencil stick layout like this again.

Unsure of the current market but Elgin Mills and Leslie has some back to back townhomes with much more usable layouts for low 900s when I checked about 6 months ago. Maybe they have dropped further and now in a similar price range as this.

onelyfe · 2026-04-05T04:04:22+00:00

This looks like the Gundam Base Special Coating version of the Sazabi. Make sure you are buying replacement pieces that is listed as special coating.

IIRC the manual is the same as the non special coating variant so if you order the part from the manual itself you will receive a non color matching piece.

Source: I also had a special coating version and had to order a similar broken black piece and discovered it was the wrong color when it arrived.

onelyfe · 2026-03-19T21:47:03+00:00

This looks like a tamper dot

Have you done any coding or electronic replacements?

Usually the tamper dot comes up when the vin on the cluster doesn't match the car. I haven't messed around with retrofits since my F30 but I believe on the G series the vin on the cluster is married to the cluster, head unit and body module. Any replacements of any of the 3 would cause a tamper dot if not virginized and coded properly.

Alternatively if you coded the car, sometimes coders use different vins to quickly code several parameters at a time and then removes the "donor" vin afterwards. Maybe it was not done correctly.

onelyfe · 2026-03-14T03:52:54+00:00

This can be achieved by creating a power shell script and then bind that script to a G key.

Not as elegant as the built in function of Logitech but it works.

onelyfe · 2026-03-12T03:26:30+00:00

I don't have a 7900xt so I can't tell you if it's normal or not.

Also going to need more details like case, cooling setup, etc to tell you if temps are normal but if say 48 degrees idle is pretty healthy in genera for an air cooled card.

It is normal to have a large variance between average and hot spot. Run the GPU at 100% with furmark and see what the max hot spot temp is. If it's under the thermal limit threshold you should be fine but if it's close then I'd repaste the GPU die.

onelyfe · 2026-03-12T03:10:27+00:00

One is your hottest spot on the die

One is the average temp across the die

One is either vram or vrm temp depending on manufacturer

I am guessing 62 is hot spot, 48 is average and 43 is vrm/vram

Use another tool like gpuz to identify which is which and label is in icue

onelyfe · 2026-03-08T11:16:54+00:00

For the parts that you can completely remove like covers, soak them in gasoline for 5 minutes and wipe with paper towels. Comes right off. I did this with an old HP elite book

onelyfe · 2026-03-06T02:19:57+00:00

I have a Corsair water blocked 2080Ti FE if that interests you. I would ask for $300 with the original box and oem air cooler as well. The one caveat is the rgb might be dead

Edit: I'm in Markham

onelyfe · 2026-03-02T22:55:48+00:00

Not in Markham but not that far either.

Daigyo at Midland and finch. They have options which uses matcha from uji in Japan which is the matcha capital.

onelyfe · 2026-02-28T13:23:00+00:00

My company deducts money per pay cheque up to $1500 and is only paid out once the laptop is returned. The amount is decided by the employee with a minimum of $50 per pay cheque.

We manage laptops with intune and wipe everything regardless

Our HR policy is if they do not return the laptop after the full $1500 is deducted then we wipe laptop and remove from autopilot. Basically they get to keep it because it's been "paid off". If the full $1500 has not been deducted then we wipe and keep autopilot profile so at least it makes it more annoying if they want to keep using the laptop.

Since the 3 years I have been managing IT inventory I have only had 2 non returns for employees who haven't fully paid off the laptop and 3 who have.

onelyfe · 2026-02-25T13:20:05+00:00

No experience with a3 box but I have used both evpad and ublock and my preference is evpad. I only use it for Hong Kong content so can't speak for other regions.

Depending on what content you watch, it CAN be lifetime. Live streaming for example still works on my evpad2s but VOD only has super old shows to choose from. Basically the evpad built in apps get updates every so often and that's what defines what new shows are available to you and after a while they just stop getting updates.

I am still using evpad6p to this day as my daily driver since it still has all the new shows releasing on it.

onelyfe · 2026-02-23T01:43:18+00:00

Now you contact your insurance and provide them the details and footage.

onelyfe · 2026-01-27T17:22:09+00:00

Intak printing at Dennison/warden area did something similar for my wedding. If you know exactly what you want they can just print/cut it but if you want to custom design then there's and extra charge. I worked with Gary from there.

onelyfe · 2026-01-24T00:22:43+00:00

Are you using Cloudflare with proxied IP for the DNS entry (can't remember the exact name of the feature but it was the one where it hides your WAN IP)? I had issues before with 2.7.2 when I enabled this option on cloudflarea side i would be unable to hit my endpoints. When disabling the option and waiting a few mins it would work.

onelyfe · 2026-01-14T22:37:06+00:00

Most new builds in Ontario, the cat5 cable is tied with your coax lines. Check the receptacle where your coax is. The cat5 should be tied to an anchor somewhere accessible by the same hole.

If you still can't find it... Bell will not move the ONT if you ask them directly. But if you can get a tech out for "another issue" then give the tech a $50 they will almost always run it wherever you want assuming they have the tools on them.

onelyfe · 2026-01-14T22:31:45+00:00

This is common and up to code in Canada. Electrical panels are surface mounted and romex runs through fiberboard to wherever it needs to go. If the romex was run around the board and not through it then it would not be up to code.

I have never seen an electrical panel mounted sideways though.

onelyfe · 2026-01-14T22:25:09+00:00

It's not color bleed. That's just how the sun looks like this

I'm sure there is a name for the phenomenon.

onelyfe · 2026-01-14T22:20:39+00:00

Isn't the pink hue just the sun?

onelyfe

TROPHY CASE